The standalone SSH 'Verify deploy destination' step was causing consistent
connection timeouts (exit 255, ~2min hang) on production deploys. Root cause:
Hostinger rate-limits concurrent SSH connections from different GitHub Actions
runner IPs — the staging job exhausts a connection window and the production
runner (on a different IP) gets timed out by the server.
Fix:
- Remove the standalone SSH verify step that was always the first to time out
- Add ConnectTimeout=30 BatchMode=yes to ALL ssh/rsync commands so failures
surface in 30s instead of the default 120s TCP timeout
- The plugin inventory pre/post check still guards against wrong-path deploys
(the actual safety guarantee we care about from the 2026-04-23 incident)
- rsync itself will fail safely if the target path doesn't exist
33faab7c4f